Sutherland and Paolozzi

I have finally moved into my brand new study space and have immediately surrounded myself with books and files. For me, having a personal space and surrounding myself with familiar things (whether they are academic titles, or silly postcards) is preferable to sitting in a library or cafe writing.

For the past two weeks I have been immersing myself in Graham Sutherland and Eduardo Paolozzi. Who knew I would become such a fan of both.

Sutherland designed a number of tapestries for Dovecot from the late-1940s onwards. Dovecot was one of the weaving studios competing for the commission to weave his tapestry design for Coventry Cathedral, which eventually went to a French studio. Apparently, negotiations got so far that a wall was knocked down at Dovecot's original studio to create the room needed for a big enough loom!

Sutherland's creation of images which were confined to the picture frame and made little reference to continuing outside it made his work highly suitable for tapestry. The rich colours or red, green and yelow also translated well and gained greater depth in their depicition in wool.

The highlight of the week was locating one of the Wading Birds tapestries in the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery - they subsequently informed me that the cartoon for it is in the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Clearly reading Agatha Christie novels has rubbed off on me - I am a modern day Miss Marple.

Pearson Tapestry, 1996, designed by Eduardo Paolozzi, woven by Douglas Grierson, David Cochrane and Naomi Cleaver. Photo: Shannon Tofts. Private Collection

The tapestry designs created by Paolozzi for Dovecot Studios are not only some of my favourites, but are also the favourite of Douglas Grierson, Head Weaver. In a conference in 1996, Douglas wrote that Paolozzi allowed the weavers greater freedom with his designs as their relationship evolved. For the Cleish Castle tapestries in the 1970s, Paolozzi simply gave the weavers a black and white outline and a selection of 30 colours; the weavers were to compose the colours in any way they wanted.

This seems to bear a resemblance to his working methods in printmaking of the same period. In an article by Lucius Grisebach, the writer describes how Paolozzi started to design his screen prints using black and white photographs which were further translated into simple black outlines. It was only later in the process, in collaboration with the printer(s) that the colours were decided upon.

Next week I am off to theEdinburgh Tapestry Workshops archives on Mount Stuart,  Bute. There is little in the archives on the 1950s to 1970s so I am hoping to fill some gaps by looking at the minutes for the AGMs with Elizabeth Cumming, the curator of Dovecot's 2012 centenary exhibition and my partner in crime.

Winter is setting in

Winter has truly arrived in our home. The dust is being shaken off our extra thick duvet, Miss Marple (the cat) has taken to only sleeping in areas of the floor where the hot pipes run and favourite dvd boxsets are making their appearance to entertain us on cold nights. Christmas is also creeping in, mainly in the form of various winter gift guides, the John Lewis one particularly tempting! The list of knitted and sewn gifts is getting longer and longer and the likelihood of me finishing them in time is quickly diminishing.

Christmas this year is an important time as it will mark the end of my first semester at uni. The finale of this term will take place at a postgrad research methods conference where I will be addressing the question: Dovecot Studios: Art or Craft? This will later be turned into a 3,000 word essay (pretty miniscule consider the length my final thesis has to be!)

It may seem that I have set myself a pretty big issue to address in a 15 minute presentation but I wanted to give my fellow students an idea of the questions facing the study of tapestry, which are likely to be very different from their own field of study. Although it is not the central question of my thesis, the issue of the art/craft divide will enable me to place my research within a context, and an in-depth knowledge of its various facets will undoubtedly inform my work.

copyright Penguin Books

I have recently been reading Deyan Sudjic's book The Language of Things (Penguin, 2009). The books investigates what it is about design which interests us and the importance of design to different areas of industrial production. It also looks into the way that design has often been seen as an opposite to art: design/art, useful/useless. Of particular interest to me was his chapter on Art which describes how the Museum of Modern Art, New York began collecting so-called design and attempted to display these items in the same as a painting by Leger. His writing brought up many issues which I feel are relevant to the study of tapestry. Are these items fine art or are they craft? Are they useful (acoustically or in their historical use in travelling royal courts) or are they useless? How importance is their material, especially in display materials in public institutions? All of this will provide rich pickings for my conference paper.

An inspiring sojourn in London part 2

Our trip to London was not entirely focused on tapestry. One of the most exciting parts of the trip was my first trip to the Design Museum.

Design Museum, London

Brit Insurance Design Awards Exhibition 2010, Design Museum, London

The Brit Insurance Design Awards Exhibition was full of fascinating items and inventions, from fashion collections to folding bicycles, community libraries to solar-powered ovens. Some of my favourite items included PARCS furniture (coloured items of modular furniture to challenge the way we imagine the workplace), the Young Creative Network's Library (for its interactive and design-led approach to library services) and Soma by Ayala Serfaty (a haunting installation of floor-based lights made from tinted glass filaments).

PARCS Furniture

Young Creative Network Library

Soma by Ayala Serfaty

Our visit to London was rounded off with a visit to Tate Modern. I was surpised at the number of artworks in the main galleries which were made from textiles or tapestry. One room was entirely devoted to Magdalena Abakanowicz's Abakan Red and Abakan Orange tapestry installations. In another, an untitled Robert Morris work of the 1960s was hung opposite Jannis Kounellis' work of the same period, featuring shanks of un-spun wool hanging over a wooden rack.

The highlight for me, by far, was Ai Weiwei's installation for The Unilever Series, Sunflower Seeds. The floor of one end of the turbine hall was covered in hundreds of thousands of ceramic sunflower seeds, created to scale. These created a beautiful grey carpet, intended for people to walk. Heartbreakingly, due to health and safety concerns the installation had been roped off, stopping anyone from walking on it. Despite this set-back, the installation still held its own and created an atmosphere of peace and intrigue.

Given my positive response to this work, I was shocked to read an article in the Guardian on the train home by artist Heather Chalmers ('These cuts are no blitzkrieg on the arts - funding has been wasted'). Without getting into the politics of her article (since Friday, it has received 110 online comments), I could not understand her use of the sunflower seeds as an example of how Tate Modern wastes it spaces by showing "some piece of tat" in its turbine hall. She criticises the use of high-profile works to draw in younger audiences but when I visited Tate Modern on Friday this installation was achieving just that. The turbine hall was full of secondary school pupils, avidly watching the documentary on how the ceramic seeds were made. How many other opportunities are there in free galleries for school-age children to learn about the skill and patience which goes into objects such as these? In the V&A, there was no film illustrating how the Raphael tapestries were made.

Opinions over the use of arts funding are never going to be objective. For me, Sunflower Seeds is perhaps my pick of the year so far for the emotional responses it provokes and Tate's informative ways of teaching us about the creative process.

An inspiring sojourn in London part 1

I have just returned from a lovely few days in London with my partner. As well as catching up with friends, the trip served two purposes for my research.

Firstly, we went to the Victoria & Albert Museum to see the Raphaels Cartoons and Tapestries. It was a brilliant display, allowing the viewer to see the finished tapestry (four of the set were loaned by Vatican Museums) at right angles to Raphael's original cartoon. In addition to the Vatican tapestries, was a tapestry woven at Mortlake Tapestry Studio, England based on one of the cartoons.

It is clear that the weavers at Pieter van Aelst's workshop in Brussels, which wove the Papal tapestries, made great changes to the colour and decorative scheme of the designs, whilst keeping the original structure of Raphael's paintings. The tapestries have been filled with gold and silver threads, reflecting the wealth of Pope Leo X, and the ornament of many of the Apostles and Christ has been made more luxurious. In Raphael's cartoon of Christ's Charge to St Peter, Christ and the Apostles are dressed in simply coloured clothing. Christ's robe is white with no decoration. In the tapestry (image below), it has been decorated with gold stars with a shimmering trim and all of the figures have brighter and more obvious halos.

For me, the scale and interpretation of the designs highlighted both similarities and differences between a Dovecot Studios and workshops from previous centuries. Dovecot no longer works on the minuscule scale of weaving which the Belgian weavers used, however its' weavers do utilise their knowledge of the medium and interpret designs for tapestries in ways which stop the finished tapestry being a direct copy.

Whilst in London, I also visited the Tate Archives to see items from the John Piper Archive which relate to Dovecot. There was a wide range of items, including a sketchbook with a hand-written draft of Piper's Foreword for the 1980 catalogue of Master Weavers, an exhibtition celebrating Dovecot Studios.

The Piper archives have given me a great deal to move forward with. Although he did not design a tapestry for Dovecot until the 1970s, the studio's Directors had been courting him since 1948, encouraging him to put forward designs at the same time as Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore.